• Two well-reviewed sequels became immediate hits at North American theaters over the weekend, but ticket sales for some films already playing fell sharply. 22 Jump Street, a $50 million comedy from Sony and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, took in a hefty $60 million, one of the biggest opening-weekend totals ever for an R-rated movie, according to Rentrak, which compiles box-office data. The film, starring Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, received an A-minus grade from moviegoers in CinemaScore exit polls, boding well for word of mouth. (21 Jump Street, which ultimately took in $202 million worldwide in 2012, received a B grade.) Arriving in second place was How to Train Your Dragon 2, a cartoon adventure that cost DreamWorks Animation $145 million to make and was distributed by 20th Century Fox. Dragon 2 took in about $50 million, a sizable total but on the low end of prerelease estimates. (The first one took in roughly the same amount in its 2010 opening: $47.5 million, after adjusting for inflation.) Analysts expect Dragon 2 to perform well in the weeks ahead, in part because of positive word of mouth -- it received an A CinemaScore -- and partly because of little animated competition. Despite the two big arrivals, total ticket sales for the weekend fell roughly 6 percent from the same period last year, partly because broader audiences did not rally around some movies already in theaters. For instance, The Fault in Our Stars rode a surge of interest from young women to a huge $48 million opening but took in about $15.7 million in its second weekend, a 67 percent decline.
• James Franco is adding another notch to his expansive resume -- stage director. Rattlestick Playwrights Theater said Monday that Franco will direct Robert Boswell's world premiere play The Long Shrift from July 7-Aug. 23. The off-Broadway job will coincide with Franco's current one on Broadway as an actor in Of Mice and Men. Franco has seemingly been dipping his toe into every element of show business, from acting in TV and films like Pineapple Express and Spider-Man to screenwriting and producing, or writing a novel and being an artist. He made his Broadway debut this spring in Of Mice and Men, with he and Chris O'Dowd playing two migrant workers trying to make their way through the aftermath of drought and the Depression in 1930s America. The play ends its run July 27.
A Section on 06/17/2014